I finished a few books recently, the first of which was Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God (1966). Even though The Diviners is probably my favourite novel, I've had trouble getting much out of her other writing.

Rachel is trapped in Manawaka, Laurence's recurring stand-in for her hometown of Neepawa, Manitoba. She's a single thirty-something grade school teacher living with her widowed mother. Their relationship has reached a level of passive-aggressiveness only attainable by Manitobans. Like so much of Laurence's work, it deals with gender, class, ethnic, sexual, religious and generational dynamics in the prairies. Her trouble with interpersonal relationships throughout the book fell so heavily on me that the ending, even if hard to swallow, was a tremendous, almost necessary, relief.

Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism (1917) was a great quick read by Luigi Fabbri, a friend of Malatesta. It's a set of three connected essays. The first is an esoteric consideration of mostly Italian literature of the time, and its misrepresentation and false glorification of anarchism as individualist. The main problem explored by the book, though, is that of violence in revolutionary movements and is taken up most directly in the second essay. Fabbri takes a similar perspective as the Australian 1970s pamphlet You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship: The Anarchist Case Against Terrorism, but does a better job at making the case that adventurist violence and its glamorization are counterproductive while still rejecting a pacifist approach. It's a good counterpoint to books like Pacifism as Pathology and How Nonviolence Protects the State, which seem to be the predominant texts influencing anarchists on this question these days.

For those interested in the topic, though, Malcolm X's 1964 speech The Ballot or the Bullet is completely indispensable. He's been painted so often as "violent" that it can be surprising to go back to his words and see that he only ever advocated self-defense. It quickly becomes clear that the "violent" label was applied by a white supremacist warmongering society terrified of a black man mincing no words in calling on others to eliminate systemic violence by any means necessary.

I've been pretty interested in what people are calling the "Pink Tide", the resurgence of leftist government in Latin America over the past ten years or so, while keeping a critique of state power in mind, as well as the desires of many "first world" socialists to vicariously live through whatever's happening in Venezuela, in Greece, or wherever. Still, I was excited to pick up Tariq Ali's Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (Revised Edition, 2008). Even though the cover features four presidents, the book really centres on Chavez and his defiance of the Washington Consensus. It's a mixed bag, though, at times history book, travelogue, political tract, even sometimes verging on spy novel. The first half turned me off with its seemingly uncritical defense of Chavez. That softened in the second half, and some really interesting narratives were drawn out, including Bolivian labour history, perspectives on the arts, a biographical sketch of the "great liberator" Simón Bolívar, all kept within a continental and even world context.

Law: Key Concepts in Philosophy (2007) was a pretty big disappointment. From the description on the back, I was to believe I'd be getting an overview of legal thought, including that of Locke, Hegel, Marx, Habermas, Dewey, Foucault, and Derrida, among others. You'd think based on that list you'd end up with some challenging, radical, maybe even insightful ideas. About half the book was spent on old-school traditional justifications for the application of the law, and the rest seemed to use all of the philosophers as foils or straw men to prove that Habermas really had the best ideas. Worse still, even his ideas weren't drawn out very well. I understand that an intro level book like this necessarily needs to gloss over a lot of detail, but I was still left feeling more unsatisfied than I expected.